FXPHD – FLM213: Flame for Nuke artists

This 12-part course, taught by Sam Edwards, is designed to get Nuke compositors up to speed on Flame. Many of the lessons will cover shots created in previous fxphd Nuke courses so that students can refer back to the previous course to compare. The course contrasts Nuke vs Flame workflows and discusses the underlying principals of compositing and how Flame handles them. You’ll be shown tools equivalent tools to those in Nuke, but special attention is paid to the unique tools in Flame.

The class covers three shots. The first is a simple matte painting shot that covers 2D tracking, roto and keying. The second is a much more advanced matte painting shot that covers the creation of the entire 3D environment. The shot tasks include harvesting a 3D tracked camera from a Nuke file, building geometry, applying textures, and creating a matte painting background from a panoramic photo. Lighting and render passes are also discussed.

The third shot uses CG renders, staring with a look at bringing multichannel EXR’s into Flame. The includes a projection of a spherical map onto 3D geometry creating animated textures for the CG. Each shot shows a slightly different technique for creating the best mattes and suppression from the green screen footage.

Edwards started using flame in 1992 when he took delivery of the second Discreet Logic system in New York City. There he worked on TV commercials, music videos, and feature films for eight years. In 2000, Edwards moved to the West Coast where he took a job at Digital Domain, where he was assigned to the Nuke development team as a test compositor and helped write the in house documentation. He has composited in Nuke and Flame on many large VFX films at ILM and other top studios. Today Sam is a VFX Supervisor and occasional compositor on television programs, feature films, and teaches at fxphd.